Archive for September, 2011

I like to watch. It is as simple as that. If you don’t stop and look around some days, you’ll never really see the full picture. The world is filled images and little details that act like hidden gems just waiting for you to find. You can walk down any street and find something interesting or beautiful if you just took your blinders off. Don’t just look side to side or dead straight; look up under and around. Observe what is going on and you may be surprised at what you find.

One of the things I enjoyed about being a bouncer was that I had to watch and observe. You start to learn the pattern of people and it gets easier to pick out the irregularities. Irregularities in a crowd can be both good or bad. A young couple having a heavy make out session, lovers meeting for the first time, a drug exchange, the preamble to a fight or shady behavior all stick out from the overall picture of what is seen in a bar. Yet they can blend in really well at times if you don’t spot them. It’s all a game to me, like an egg hunt of sorts. Every bar or club I enter is immediately scanned for spots where things could happen, then I look to see what type of crowd surrounds me and then I look for the place best suited for me to sit and watch. Sometimes this can be seen as problematic. I would refuse to go to certain places again after seeing what a madhouse it was. I see no reason to be in a place that is dangerous beyond the point of exciting and leans more towards being a deathtrap. Friends and lovers alike used to think I was no fun for not wanting to go to bars known for having shootings in the parking lot regularly. I saw it as having an allergic reaction to lead pills.

I love going out late at night and seeing what the world has to offer me as the majority of its inhabitants slumber. It’s easier to find things, for me, at night as you don’t have the sun’s glare in your eyes. Recently, I saw an older couple dancing on their balcony. A slow waltz or something similar I suppose. But it was awesome to see two old people still in love with each other like the day they first met. They too were using the veil of the night for their advantage. I didn’t want to interfere or interrupt the moment as some nosey onlooker, so off I went. It’s moments like those that make me not loathe the world as much as I do. It’s like some affirmation that good things still exist.

Even when all I see is the bums shuffling or slumbering on the street, the tricks working their corners and the junkies fixing, it’s still a glimpse into the world no one wants to admit we live in. The real world. I never saw the point of turning a blind eye to the problems. These proverbial monsters under our beds that haunt us as we sleep. It made more sense to get used to them rather than deny that it is happening. And there is a uniqueness to this atrocity exhibit that I find exhilarating. My outlook is that life is built on moments. With that said, I would rather have a life built on unique moments rather than mundane ones. I like catching rare glimpses of raw life, even when it hurts. I think it is almost damnable to live life like cattle and just shuffle along your usual route to the cubicle you call a job. You need to switch it up sometimes and just see what is out there and take notice of all the flaws the gem of life bears. These flaws, these imperfections are what make things so interesting. Anyone can walk into a jewelry store and see a perfectly cut stone, but rarely do we get to find one in the raw.

Sometimes you do things for a friend and sometimes those things are not ideally fun. In this instance my friend asked me to accompany him on a blind date. A female friend of his was introducing him to her cute friend and I was asked to come along so that things would be balanced. My friend, we’ll call him The Doctor, had explained that his female friend was “irresistibly ugly”. He was being very kind with his description.

The Doctor’s truck had been broken into the night before and was in a rather foul mood to begin with. So it wasn’t going to take much to irritate him this fine evening. I, being a good friend, agreed that he should go on the date and maybe getting a piece of ass would do him some good. So sure, I’ll tag along and engage his ugly friend in witty banter as he makes like Romeo with her friend. He’s just gonna have to keep the rounds coming.

They call us from the plaza a few short blocks away informing us that they have not only arrived, but that they also are having some car problems. We meet them, introductions all around and then we take a look at the car. It turns out the front bumper of the car was falling off and we could do a hasty repair with some bailing wire in the meantime. We go to the tattoo parlor where we work at to obtain some wire and pliers. The owner is there late tattooing some longstanding clients. I explain what is going on and proclaim that The Doctor is trying to set me up with a yeti. The clients are now intrigued as to how ugly this young lady I am playing defense with actually is. I made it very clear from the start that I had no intentions of hooking up with her; I am just the wingman. We grab what we need to repair the yeti-mobile and head back to the girls. We slap everything together, tell the girls to park the car and meet us at the shop when they are done.

Back at the shop jokes are volleyed about how I got stuck with the She-Beast of Caguas. My escape plan, at worst, would be to ask if she would kindly wait a moment as I slip into something more comfortable; like my jogging pants and track shoes. Our dates meet us at the shop, we bring them back to meet the owner and so that everyone can satisfy their curiosity of how unpleasant on the eyes my companion is. One of the clients in the shop leans in to my ear and whispers in my ear “Make like Forrest: Keep running!”. The Doctor briefly engages in conversation with his date to learn that not only is she not a very smart mouse, but her attitude is as unattractive as her friend looks. Again I am pulled aside and it has been decreed, we need to ditch these girls with a quickness.

My friend invites them back to our apartment to smoke some weed. I was asked if I was smoking with them and I informed them that I actually don’t smoke anything. It just isn’t my deal. “So you must think potheads are stupid, huh?”, one of the girls ask. “No, I just don’t smoke. It’s that simple. I’ll hang out and have a beer instead”, I reply. The walk from the shop to the apartment is literally two blocks on an incline. Not a major incline, a little steep, but it isn’t like we are going hiking up Mt. Everest. The ladies are lagging behind and complaining aloud the whole time, which works to my friend and I’s advantage to plan our escape. I tell him to mention the car break in, explain how one of his long boards was stolen and how we put some feelers out to keep an eye out for it. I will discreetly call him after he has smoked them out and act like they have found the thief. It is agreed that this plan is a good plan.

Our apartment is not a small place. It is kind of spacious, but it’s far from being a mansion. The girls start looking around and are pretty much appraising us. I hate feeling like I have a price tag on me and I really find it rude when people think you are well off. Some topical conversation is made and the three of them start to light up. After a polite amount of time the signal is thrown to make the call. I hit call on my phone from inside my pocket and we get the ball rolling. The Doctor goes into an Emmy worthy scene where he acts as though the culprit is being held by some friends and that we will be on our way. He reaches into his messenger bag, grabs his pistol and cocks it as he stuffs it in his waistband. The girls start to look very grim and they get the hint that it is time for them leave. We show them the door and apologize for any inconvenience. I mean they did drive an hour to meet us. We close the door behind us and try not to laugh out loud.

A few minutes later The Doctor gets a text message, it says “Don’t do anything you’ll regret later”.

If she only knew how right she was, and that move right there is what we in Old San Juan call The Shinobi.

Like this:

I had this nightmare a few years back and it still haunts me. It was really vivid to the point that I woke up questioning what happened. It follows as such:

I am walking through one of the grittier parts of Chinatown. It’s a late foggy evening. Typical for NYC in the early spring. I walk up to a building and gain entrance into it and then, quietly, break into one of the apartments. It’s your typical run down apartment in that area. The smell of mold and mildew linger and mix with the strong scent of cramped living. Slow and steadily make my way into one of the bedrooms and see a child in his bed. He’s probably 5 or 6. The perfect image of some adorable asian boy complete with the Moe Howard bowl cut. I stand and stare over him for a second watching his breathing patterns and how somber he looks. Slowly, I take a pillow and begin to smother him. His hands reach up and blindly try to pull the pillow off. His legs kick and his body arcs as he struggles to survive. His screams are muffled by the pillow and I have all my body weight pressing down on him. He heaves up one last time before he goes completely limp. I leave just as I came and continue my walk.

One of the things that really bothered me about the dream is I remembered the street and building address. I had woken up feeling sick to my stomach with what I thought I had done and I had kept repeating the address. I wrote the address down and the next day I went to check it out. It was deep in Chinatown, towards East Broadway. It’s not exactly an easy spot to get to or a well ventured part of that neighborhood. I reach my destination and look up and the building looks exactly like I had dreamt it. I nearly shit myself for I rarely am in this sector and have no idea how and why I would remember this place. I still think about this nightmare and how badly it shook me.

Stun Gun: (noun) An electroshock weapon, an incapacitant weapon that momentarily disables a person with an electric shock, endless hours of entertainment.

There are many traditions among men and women coming of age. Not uncommon, but least spoken of, is the teenage tradition of carrying a weapon for show. A form of bravado if you will. Many a young man (and some young women) can be found with a pair of brass knuckles or a switchblade that they never really intend to use, but will pull it out as a means of intimidation. This ritual is very similar to a peacock ruffling his feathers or a dog showing it’s fangs. More exotic weapons like collapsable batons and stun guns can be found on those wanting to up the ante. But again, seldom “tools” are often used. Youth gangs and teenage career criminals excluded.

When I was a teenager a very good friend of mine had obtained a very high voltage stun gun. Most of the time said friend would sit there and pull the trigger just to hear the crack of electricity which would make the rest of us jump back with fear of getting zapped. Other times we would use it to shock each other when we least expected it. It was a fun toy.

On days where there was nothing to do my friends and I would go to the mall. While being a mallrat is another form of teenage tradition, it was not part of our tradition. Malls were for people of the suburbs. People with good homes and parents with good jobs. A hang out for the elderly, a friendly place, and we hated that. We hated these suburban brats that lingered in these shopping centers, we hated the blue haired elderly walking dead and we wanted to be the dark cloud on the friendly family atmosphere that the mall provided. Why? Simple: we were skinheads. We were the most hated subculture known to man and we basked in that glory. There were a few perks to going to the mall aside from being a menace. You had suburban girls to hit on, free samples of frozen yogurt or chocolate covered pretzels and you could play video games for free at the display counters. But the most fun came from being a terror to the general population.

So here we are in our local mall in the outer limit of a southern city. It’s a bustling Friday evening. Young males are looking to court young women. Shoppers bustling along looking for a good deal on whatever it is they are looking for and then there was us; a couple of young drunken skinheads up to no good whatsoever. Doling out hard looks for no real reason and spouting obscenities without regard gets boring really fast. Eventually you move onto wiseass moves like going to Victoria Secret and asking the staff if they have a lingerie set in your size or buying some edible panties from Spencer’s Gifts and eating them in plain sight; slowly and delicately of course. Crass pick up lines like “Anyone get to you yet?” or “Wanna play ‘just the tip’?” are volleyed at females of all sorts, not even the elderly women were spared. We figured they needed some loving too.

On this one particular outing we noticed that an escalator was down and at this end of the mall stairs would be required to ascend or descend to the next level. As we made our journey upwards I took notice that the hand rail was made of a nice metal, possibly brass or copper, but a nice conducive metal none the less. As we got to the end of the stairs I asked my friend if I could see his stun gun. He asked why and with that I grinned. “I just want to try something”, I said and with that he obliged. I took hold of the stun gun and put the two metal points to the hand rail and squeezed the trigger. The hand rail carried the current and shocked everyone that was holding it. This act of terrorism was considered brilliant among my cohorts. We scrambled momentarily as to not be discovered by mall security and regrouped at the next stairwell, only to commit the same heinous act on the general public again and again. It was a lovely day looking back on it. Watching people jump as a hard electrical current hit them from nowhere filled us with such sadistic glee.

We’d go on to tell the story to our friends later on in the evening. Talk about how each one of us took a turn trying to electrocute the masses. Each one talking about the funnier moments of their experience and everyone breaking into tears of laughter. Each version of the story becoming more and more robust with bullshit, but never seeming to lose its humor.

Sure, someone could have been severely hurt. Maybe some old bag with a pacemaker could have died too. But I regret very little. Even today as I venture to the mall like a good little consumer, I wish I had a stun gun every time I see a stairwell. Somethings will never change.

I am walking down the street I used to live on. A former neighbor who is loud mouthed and opinionated confronts me for some reason or another. I ask her to shut up and go away. However, she insists to pursue her verbal tirade. I in turn lose my temper and crack her in the mouth. It sends her head back and she goes down like a ton of bricks. Her cuckold husband steps up to defend some sort of honor. Maybe he us afraid of what his wife will say and do when she awakens. Regardless, I somehow wind up stabbing him and killing him. His brother or friend comes at me and again, wind up stabbing and killing the person. I look down at the woman, who is now a sobbing mess, and reach down and cut her throat. I am never sure if I do this out of compassion for killing her husband and not wanting her to go through some sort of widows remorse or if I just hate her that much and am enraged. I do know that it is not out of fear of being caught by authorities. As usually in this dream I sit on the steps of their house, inform the police of my actions and wait patiently. Other variations is that I am on the run for a month to simply tie up some personal loose ends and I then turn myself in. The other constant is knowing full well that my life is ruined permanently.

Like this:

I tend to fall victim to night terrors and nightmares. It is what it is. But they are not pleasant and they tend to make my life awkward. I try to stay awake as long as possible so that I can just crash hard without dreaming. It also means that I stay in a state of perpetual tiredness. It’s a no win situation either way you look at it. Ask any girlfriend I have ever had and some will tell you that they learned to duck in their sleep. Anyways, I figured I would start documenting some of the more reoccurring nightmares. Maybe some fruity dream analyst can sort me out or something. Fix me, I am in desperate need.

No matter what precautionary steps I take when handling jalapeños or any hot pepper for that matter, I will always wind up with residual juice somewhere uncomfortable. Usually it’s my eye or nose, which makes for a good laugh. But not this time.

I don’t know if jalapeños are more potent in the Caribbean or not, but the ones I get from my local and rather shitty Supermax are not to be fucked with. They are what I imagined jalapeño peppers to be as a child; a fire inducing, digestive track searing, colon wrecking pepper from hell. As an adult I found that scotch bonnets are more lethal, as are the jolokia peppers; but I don’t cook with those that often.

Recently, I had some of these jalapeños in my fridge so that I could make my infamous Mexican Torpedoes. They are a jalapeño popper of sorts. Tasty, but lethal due to some of the ingredients added. Great for when you need to get rid of all the cold beer in the house. I personally hate cold beer, especially free cold beer, and have to see it gone as soon as possible. A plate of these act as the perfect tool to implementing a blitzkrieg on said suds. Back to the point, I took a pepper and had chopped it up to make a sort of relish for some hot dogs I was cooking for dinner. I had thoroughly washed my hands, or so I had thought and went about my life as usual on a tuesday. Some time later I went to relieve myself, and that’s when the problems started.

I guess I had managed to get jalapeño juice all over my penis. The head and the shaft, under my foreskin and everywhere in between. If this was saliva from a blow job, I’d say “job well done”. But it wasn’t. At first I waited to gauge exactly how bad the pain was gonna be. If it would eventually go away on it’s own and only mildly irritate me, I’d ride it out. Not happening. I decided that a shower was in order; a cold shower to be more exact. It seemed to do the trick for all of a few seconds and then the insurmountable burning sensation returned. Naked and wet, I dashed for the freezer and procured some ice cubes and gripped said ice cubes to my cock and prayed a little. No luck. Again, this time with a fist full of ice and man meat, I dashed for the shower. Still no luck. I sat there in the shower debating what I was going to do. I am sweating bullets of fear and pain in a cold shower, my balls now hurts from all the fucking ice I have firmly gripped to my neither regions and I am debating going to the hospital. I envision myself trying to explain in bad spanish to the kind doctors in the ER what is wrong and if they could help me. It wasn’t a pretty picture and decided that maybe if I went to La Perla and picked a fight, I may come out with better results than what the doctors could provide. My mind drifts to all the science classes I took and if there was any sort of remedy for my predicament. I mean it’s basically an acid I have all over my no-no spot: a base should solve the problem. So I start thinking of what I could possibly have in my fridge to save me. Flour? No, I’m not baking a cake down there and I doubt it will work. Vinegar? Vinegar will just make it worse and I am not making a pickle. Milk! Fuck yes! Milk! That is the key to my salvation. So I trek back to the kitchen naked and wet again, only this time I am hobbling. I fill a cup with milk and romantically insert my member into it. Salvation at last, I can feel the milk’s soothing embrace and the pain is subsiding. I was also very grateful that the milk had not expired and not a curdled homemade cheese. I’d stick my dick in yogurt before I stuck it in soured milk.

I have a moment of dread and realize that while my roommate was out of town, our houseguest may show up at any moment to find me in the kitchen naked, sweaty and wet sighing in relief with my genitals in a cup full of milk. As quick witted as I can be, I saw no possible way of properly explaining in a succinct manner what was going on. So I start hobbling back to the bathroom, meat and potatoes in a cup of milk that is now sloshing everywhere and proceed to take another shower. I swore that from here on in I’d always have fresh milk in my fridge; always.